This trip marks my fourth time in Lisbon, a beautiful city that I cannot help but always want to come back to.
It is also my first time taking a true solo trip.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? After 37 countries, most of which have been part of my adult life, I’ve never really traveled alone.
Sure, I lived in London at the tail-end of a global pandemic, when quarantines and lockdowns were still in place. I certainly lived alone, and did most things by myself, but I had some structure and my own mini-community. I was by no means doing it truly alone.
Even when I was by myself, I was exploring my new home base. Taking walks alone through the park and navigating neighborhoods were just a part of getting settled in the city I was living in.
If we’re getting really specific, I’ve had days in both Dublin and Amsterdam to explore alone, which some might still consider solo travel. Since both were punctuated by joining back up with others, I don’t think they count.
I’ve flown alone (with nearly 200 flights in the last three years alone… but who’s counting?) I’ve taken trains and navigated plenty of public transportation alone and in languages I have no basis for comprehending.
Yet, still, at the end of the day, this is my first solo trip in full.
It’s easy, and still feels like it might only ‘partially count’ because I’m familiar with the city and its neighborhoods, and knew what I was getting into.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t been exploring completely alone, though. I’ve dined alone, had a hotel room for myself, and spent lots of time reflecting.
In fact, the most time I’ve spent with anyone on this (short) trip was earlier today with my tattoo artist, his wife, and their young daughter. I decided yesterday morning, after landing here, that it was time to see if anyone had last-minute availability for a small tattoo I’d been considering for years.
That’s how I wound up in Campo de Ourique, a neighborhood in the Northwestern part of the city, in the home of a family from St. Petersburg.
Andrei was the first artist I messaged, and the first that responded while I was still waiting to get into my hotel room.
The power of social media truly astounds me, in the sense that we can access information so quickly and connect with others so readily. So much of it may be overly gratuitous, but when used with intention it is such a powerful tool.
So, I sat down in the gorgeous spare room-turned tattoo studio in their third-story home (floor 2, in Europe) and chatted with Andrei and his wife, who acted as his translator for some of the English he wasn’t quite confident with. Their daughter greeted me as I walked in, and then later watched her dad work- a future artist in the making.
I have the word ‘saudade’ on the back of my neck, which feels fitting because the concept always seems to be on my mind.
Saudade is a Portuguese term, loosely translated as a state of ‘profoundly nostalgic longing’ for something or someone absent.
I like the fact that it cannot be directly summed up in a word that we carry in English, it feels like it makes the idea appropriately ‘other’ than me, and the culture I grew up in.
All the same, I can’t imagine going through my life without saudade.
While it can feel like a melancholic thing, the sentimentality of missing a moment, or place, or person so deeply that it touches your soul, it is also the biggest privilege I’ll ever have.
To miss so many things, to have had so many moments in my life that I’d do anything to return to, and to have had so many deep connections with people in this world that I ache for – this is what reminds me that I am living a life so full that it cannot be contained within one singular narrative.
Instead, I have groups of friends from different periods of life, most of whom I have been able to introduce to others from separate periods. I get to characterize them as ‘my Chile friends,’ ‘my SAS friends,’ ‘my Alabama friends,’ ‘my Chicago friends,’ and so on. I get to refer to events that happened as ‘after South Africa,’ ‘during the Mexico month,’ or ‘on our second Bali trip.’
I get to lose myself rummaging through old film photos, pieces of writing, or videos I created of times that have passed, and think about how deeply I miss that version of the person I was and the experience I was having at that time.
It is not lost on me how incredible my young life has managed to be, nor how privileged I have been to have experienced so much in such a short time. I get to have a life that I would have only dreamed of as a young kid. It hasn’t been without lots of hard work, but I’ve also had doors opened for me that I understand many people will never have access to.
So, I get to be what my friends have referred to as a ‘sentimental b*tch’ because if there is one thing to know about me? It is that saudade sticks to me like glue.
Something about the fact that I’ll never physically see this tattoo with my own eyes (or even without a second mirror held up to reflect it into my line of sight) feels very deeply significant. Saudade is not a tangible thing, and as ever-present as it is, it’s not for us to grasp or mold.
This will soon be just another trip I find myself missing at random; on a Tuesday at 10:30 pm while looking for a photo of something and ending up scrolling through the memories of these couple days. It will, however, always be the first trip that I truly took by myself, and not for a soul other than myself.
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